Sally Albiso

Sally Albiso earned a BA in Spanish from UCLA and an MA in English with a creative writing emphasis
from San Diego State University. While at SDSU, she studied with the poets Glover Davis and Carolyn
Forché and completed a thesis of her own poetry.

After receiving her master’s degree, she taught English composition, creative writing, and English
as a Second Language at Chapman College, San Diego State University Extension, and Southwestern College.

In 2003, Albiso and her husband moved from California to the North Olympic Peninsula of Washington
State, where she returned to writing poetry.

She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and received the Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Prize,
The Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award, and the Camber
Press Chapbook Award for her chapbook Newsworthy. Two other chapbooks, The Notion of Wings
and The Fire Eater and the Bearded Lady, were published by Finishing Line Press in 2015 and 2016.
Her poems have appeared in Blood Orange Review, Common Ground Review, Crab Creek Review,
Floating Bridge Review, Poetica, Pontoon: an anthology of Washington State poets, Rattle, The Comstock Review,
and other publications.

Poem from Moonless Grief

When You Visit

firs dim against a drifting sky, crows beat west
eclipsing the horizon. A hush sifts
down the hall. Night fills the breaches
between trees, a lunar crescent ascending
like an illustration in the stories you read me,
earth listing. The next morning
fog lifts like a memory slowly unveiling.
Blue herons stalk the shore stabbing at water
as if it were flesh through which flesh is pulled
delivered into light from a fluid darkness.
Kingfishers kite with a nervous energy like yours.
I ask if you remember dancing
with abandon spinning me into shadow
then sun, our faces transparent as the eggs
I incubated for school waiting for cracks
to appear. Each stumbling chick
we placed into a cushioned box later found
dead, necks broken when they tried to escape
their cardboard nest. How we knew even then
we couldn’t save each other.